


We've Been Way Too Out Of Touch

by everyperfectsummer



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, dear evan hansen au, let's see how many musical references I can fit in, only no one dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-06 10:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10332281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Len's therapist gives him a homework assignment, and everything snowballs from there.





	1. A Secondhand Sorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laCommunarde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laCommunarde/gifts).



> Thanks to crimsondomingo for advice, bc I wouldn't have posted this otherwise, and lacommunarde for letting me yell at them about dear evan hansen.

“Do you feel you have a habit of negative self-talk?” Ms. Hansen asks him, and Len squashes the urge to roll his eyes at her constant habit of phrasing statements as questions. As though validating her assumptions about his life will somehow improve his mental health.

 

Instead, he responds with a shrug.

 

Ms. Hansen leans forward, as if sharing a secret. “A trick I try that works sometimes is writing yourself a letter. Only positive things. Things you like about yourself, things you’re looking forward to.”

 

He thinks about things that fall into either of those categories and comes up with zilch.

 

“Promise me you’ll at least try it?”

 

He nods, and she lets him leave the session. For all that she annoys him, she has had good tips in the past, and so he tries to see if this one will work out or not. So he writes himself a letter, listing all the good things in his life, all the good things about him, everything he’s looking forward to, and although it takes him awhile, he gets there eventually.

* * *

 

A few days later, he falls down the stairs.

 

“I know how it sounds,” he tells Mick,” but I actually did fall down the stairs.”

Mick, who can see through his lies, also knows when he’s telling the truth. “‘Kay,” he says, letting the issue go. Mick would save him from his father in a heart-beat if he could, just like Len would save Mick from the pyromania, if only either of those things were possible. But wherever that possible is, it isn’t here.

 

* * *

 

Lisa’s initial reaction, upon seeing the cast, is “Cool! You can get people to sign it, and then you’ll have friends!”

He exchanges amused looks with his dad, a  _ she says the darndest things  _ look, and he says “Sure, Lisa,” before heading out the door to school. 

 

Walking past the Allen house, he gets a “Good morning, Len!” from Mrs. Allen, who seems to always have an extra pie, and then he reaches Mick’s house. The two of them catch the bus together, and on the way over, Mick says he won’t sign Len’s cast. “Seems a bit girly to me, bro,” he says, snickers erupt on the bus around them, and Len is crushed.

 

He goes through math in a bit of a daze, and signs out of study hall to go to the computer room second period.

 

He knows Mick is his friend, they’ve been friends for years, friends through his father’s abuse and his mom leaving and Mick’s obsession with fire and delinquency issues and somehow, it feels like this one act erases all of that. Which it shouldn’t, and it’s totally dumb to think that it does, totally dumb to feel friendless just because his friend doesn’t want to sign his cast, but - that’s how he feels.

 

Even  _ Mick _ didn’t sign his cast. He’s got to be the only kid in school who could break his arm and not get anyone to sign their cast. Not one single person.

 

He opens the doc that contained his therapy homework letter, and deletes it all, and starts to type.

 

_ Dear Leonard Snart,  _ he addresses himself formally, the way Ms. Hansen asked him to in his letter about how good, how amaaaazing life was. Fuck her.

 

_ I’ve given up on it being a good year, a good life. Let’s be real, no one would notice if I wasn’t there, except maybe my neighbor on West Street.  _ He and Mick have called each other “West Street Neighbor” for years now, as part of an inside joke that was never really funny.  _ Lisa...Lisa would notice, but she can live without me. They all can. _

 

It’s less than a tenth of the length of his first letter, but it says more than the first one did.

 

He prints it out, carefully, from the school computer, not sure what he plans to do with it, exactly - throw it away? Rip it up? Burn it?

 

Barry Allen makes the decision for him, when he stumbles into the room, catches Len’s eye, and starts laughing. Len’s more than a little confused about what’s so funny - until he realizes that Barry’s staring at his cast. “Still couldn’t get anyone to sign it?”

 

“It’s not funny, Allen,” he sneers, in a way that looks menacing on his dad but is less effective on him.

 

“Want me to sign it? That way we can both pretend we have friends,” Barry says, and the words come out sad, rather than cruel. “Want me to sign it?” he repeats, and something about the tone makes Len say yes, and turn sideways so that Barry can sign his cast.

 

Then Barry catches sight of the letter in his hand. “What’s that?”

 

“Therapy assignment,” Len answers, and then berates himself for answering honestly.

 

Barry grabs the letter and starts reading, only to stop abrubtly with a scowl. “Neighbor on West Street? You mean Mick. It’s always fucking you and Mick, always has been. Why is it always you and Mick, anyway? Why did you never want to hang out with me? What was wrong with me, that with three boys the same age on the same street, I’m the one who got left out?”

 

Len doesn’t know what to say or how to respond, guilt warring with anger in his mind, and in the end, he watches Barry walk away, letter clutched in his hand.

 

* * *

 

 

At home, later that night, he gets a twitter alert from the school. Idly hoping that school might be canceled tomorrow, even though it’s way too early for snow, he opens it.

 

To his horror, the all-too-familiar announcement reads  _ We will be canceling the football game tomorrow due to the severe injury of a student. _ He breathes a sigh of relief - it’s an injury this time, not a death. But who is it? His heartbeat ratchets up again. It’s not Lisa, he can hear her moving around in her room. He frantically texts Mick, knowing that all around town, students are doing the same thing with their friends.

  
The benefit of only having one friend is that, in situations like this, he only has one person to worry about. Mick texts him back in under 30 seconds with  _ it’s not me im ok,  _ and he lets out a deep breath. It’s ok. Everything’s ok.


	2. We've Been Way Too Out Of Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dear Leonard Snart, we've been way too out of touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Triggers at the end.

The next day at school, he finds out that the kid who’d suffered a “severe injury” was Barry Allen, and severe didn’t begin to cover it. The kid had tried to kill himself with a bunch of chemicals from the chem lab, and ended up in a coma. He thinks back to the hysterical boy in the computer room, swinging so fast from laughing to near crying, and wonders if he should’ve known, if there was a sign anywhere in there. And then he moves on, because Barry has always been peripheral to his life, just another kid on his street, and while he wishes the best for the kid he’s not really involved.

 

* * *

 

Or he isn’t until he gets called to the office a month later, and finds himself confronted with Mr. and Mrs. Allen, who hand him a familiar note that reads:

_Dear Leonard Snart,_

_I’ve given up on it being a good year, a good life…_

 

“It was decided,” the principal tells him in the annoying way adults always do when they pretend that decisions just happen and aren’t something people are responsible for, “that you should be allowed to read his suicide note, as it was addressed to you.”

 

Looking around at all these adults, not wanting to come clean out of some combination of fear of authority and misplaced guilt, he says, “Ok,” and starts reading the letter as though he’s never seen it before.

 

The adults shuffle awkwardly as he reads it, and Mrs. Allen is the first to break the silence. “We were wondering if the two of you were - are - close.”

 

Len blinks, bemused. “No?”

 

Mr. Allen wraps an arm around her shoulders. “It’s just that, our son never mentioned having any friends, and for him to have addressed his last - what he thought would be his last - letter to you, instead of one of us...that says a lot about what he thought about your relationship.”

 

Here’s the sum total of what Len knows about Barry Allen: that he’s nerdy, that he’s lived two houses down from Len for his entire life, and that, having been in a coma for a month now, he will probably never wake up. He’s not an altruistic person, but the Allen’s have always been kind to him, and so for once when he opens his mouth to lie, it’s motivated by kindness, not self preservation. “Well,” he hedges, “we were. _.._ friends.” He’s not lying, exactly, just stretching the truth. Their paths did cross. At school, and sometimes at home, because they’d all grown up on the same street and - and Barry had been right to feel left out, in the computer lab, because why _hadn’t_ they been friends?

 

He gestures at Barry’s name on his cast, still the only name that adorns it. “He was really nice about me breaking my arm.”

 

* * *

 

After that, the lie starts to spiral out of control. Kids come up to him in the hallway, and talk about how they always saw him, Mick, and Barry together. He wants to shout at them, because if they’d ever noticed anything about him or Barry, they’d know it was a lie. But, also...he wants to convince them, to have them keep believing it, because in some weird way, the more people tell him that it was true, the more it starts to seem as though it might have been, as though it was.

 

* * *

 

Len asks Mick for help faking a friendship. Fakes an alternate version of falling down the stairs, one where Barry was there too, instead of his own dumb self tripping over nothing because he'd thought his dad was home and panicked.

 

They’re lying on Mick’s bed, both staring at the ceiling, trying to come up with a story of a few events that could have happened, to make Barry and Len not close, but at least actually friends, so that his suicide note being addressed to Len seems less sad.

 

“Just, I don’t know, pretend you were trying to be a good influence on the kid of something,” Mick tells him.

 

“What, do I try and get the kid to stop smoking drugs?”

 

“ _Smoking drugs?”_ Mick repeats, voice high and mocking.

 

“Oh, shut up, you know what I meant.”

 

They lapse back into silence again, until Len says, “I dunno, I just want them to think that we were actually close-ish friends, not just the only person besides his parents he had to address the note to.”

 

Mick clasps a hand over his heart, and says, “Dear Leonard Snart, you and I have a deep and profound bond that goes beyond mere friendship. No homo or anything -”

 

“Hey!”

 

“Why’re you always so upset when - when I say no homo…” Micks trails off, seemingly struck by something. “You know - if you’re like that - if you were gay,” Mick says, “that’d be ok. You know. With me.”

 

This isn’t how Len pictured coming out to Mick - although several of his scenarios _had_ involved Mick’s bed - but the tone of voice Mick’s using makes him thank that maybe, it will be ok.

 

“That’s. Well. Pan, actually. Pansexual. But also. I don’t want to lie to his parents,” he says, changing the topic back.

 

“You just don’t want to tell them the truth?”

 

Len groans, covering his face with a hand. “Exactly.”

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t take long for the school to forget about Barry Allen. Their small high school’s already had three people die - actually die, not just linger in an almost dead state for months - and once the immediate shock has passed, people move on. Everyone moves on.

 

Except, it seems, for Len.

 

He walks past Barry Allen’s house every day to get to Mick’s, to go catch the bus, where he meets a friend he’s only out to because of Barry Allen, to a school that he went to every day with Barry Allen with an arm now out of a cast that only Barry Allen signed and he just. He knows it’s not his fault that Barry tried to kill himself, that someone else’s decisions aren’t his responsibility, and that it won’t be his fault when the next person at school tries and maybe succeeds, but. Just because it won’t have been his fault doesn’t mean there might not have been something he could’ve done to prevent it.

 

* * *

 

“Len, what the fuck, it’s three in the morning, why are you in my room?”

 

“We need to start a fundraiser for suicide hotlines at school.”

 

“We need to _what?_ ”

 

“So that we stop getting fucking tweets from the fucking school about an injured or dead kid where everyone panics about who it is. I want to stop panicking, I want everyone to stop panicking. Mick, come on, we have to do this.”

 

Mick groans, sitting up in bed. “Fine, but can we at least do it in the morning?”

 

Len smiles, the first non-smirk smile he’s had in what seems like forever. “Sure thing, bro.”

 

* * *

 

They get the Allen’s permission for the Friendship Project, so named because Len doesn’t want it to be like the Matt what’s-his-name award at school, where the kid is honored but has long since ceased to matter to the generations of students that came after him. He wants it to apply equally well in ten years as today, and he wants it to be about all kids who feel suicidal, not just Barry. So the Friendship Project it is.

 

There are two parts to the project; one, a secret santa that he and Mick organize for December, where what’s exchanged are biweekly notes, rather than presents, with the thought that it might lead to friendships for kids who don’t have any, and that even one new friendship is worse the hassle of a secret santa. The second is a fundraiser, organized in January, where Len and Mick and the Allens buy a lot of small flowers in bulk and sell them to the students, asking them as they buy things to vote on a suicide hotline to donate the money to.

 

He’s not sure if it’s legal, exactly, but he makes sure to sell across the street from the school instead of on school grounds, and figures that that covers his bases. In the end, the money is donated to crisischat, Len starts talking with some of the juniors to see if they can organize the same two events for next year, and everyone moves on once again.

 

And then Barry Allen wakes up.

 

* * *

 

 

Len doesn’t find out until he’s called back into the office one week, and is confronted, once again, with the Allens.

“Our boy woke up a few days ago,” a still fragile-but-happier-looking Mrs. Allen tells him, “and he’s ready for visitors now, and says he’d like to talk to you.”

 

The principal offers to sign him out of class, and there’s nothing Len can do but agree to go with them, panicking all the while.

 

* * *

 

When they get to the hospital, Barry asks if he can have  a moment with Len alone. His parents exchange nervous glances, but allow it, leaving the room. It’s a spacious room, with a window that looks out onto a brick wall. He wonders whether the window or the wall had been built first, or if they’d both been built at once in some failure of design, and then realizes that he’s rambling in his head because he’s panicking and that Barry’s already started speaking.

 

“...I woke up, and everyone was telling me about _my friend Len,_ and how _nice_ he was, and how much he did for me, and I’m not going to lie, I got really mad hearing at how hard to lied to people, because I thought you were lying to make yourself seem nicer, or something like that, and I felt like you were using me…” Barry trails off, and Len tries to look impassive, rather than guilty.

 

Then he continues, “but I heard about the Friends Project, how you thought that people were forgetting about me, and you wanted to make sure that nothing like that happened again, and…you seem like the sort of person who would’ve been a good friend, if any of this was real.”

 

Len waits a beat, just to make sure that Barry’s actually done, and says,  “I know we were never really friends, but after a while it almost felt like we were, just because everyone assumed it, you know? Because everyone thought the letter you stole was from you to me, and...I didn’t want to tell the truth and it all sort of snowballed. But.

 

Your parents talked to me a lot, and I didn’t really have anything to tell _them,_ but they had plenty to tell me. I found out more about you, and who you were, and I know we were never really friends,” he repeats, “but...would you like to be?”

  
Barry looks at him, a slow smile spreading over his face. “Yes. I - I’d like that a lot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for: suicide attempt, light homophobia, canon child abuse that's barely referenced but there, please tell me if there's anything else that I missed!
> 
> If you recognize it, it's not mine. 
> 
> Also, finding out on twitter about students dying, is based on my actual life experience. The moment of frantic panic when everyone grabs their phones and tries to figure out if it's someone they care about or not? I could write a thesis on that moment, and the trauma that comes from the district not just /telling us who it is ohmygod who's behind this system/.
> 
> Please leave a comment and tell me what you think?


	3. I Will Sing No Requiem Tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And all he sees is blue sky, for forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you recognize it, it’s not mine! Everything based on Dear Evan Hansen, various other musicals, or my own experiences after my suicide attempt. If there’s a grammar error or something I didn’t tag, please let me know!  
> Additional trigger warnings for this chapter at the end.

The school has gotten nervous about the possibility of being sued, and tried to make Barry drop out - he was old enough that he didn’t legally  _ have _ to be in school anymore, so they didn’t have to keep him. Len isn’t sure whether it was legal for them to make him drop out anyway, being a public school and everything, but Barry doesn’t like to talk about his war with the school so he mostly lets it drop.

 

* * *

 

 

Barry loses some of his college acceptances. He finds out about the first one when he’s still in the hospital. (“They won’t let me leave, even though I’m healthy now,” Barry explained, “because they’re sooo scared I’m going to hurt myself, wouldn’t that just be  _ terrible. _ ”)

 

Len comes in that afternoon to visit - visiting hours are pretty strict - and signs away his sweatshirt, keys, and shoes so that he can come inside to see Barry, in a now-familiar routine.

 

“I can’t go to my dream school, anymore,” Barry tells him, a little teary eyed.

 

Uncertain about how to respond, Len settles on, “I’m sorry.”

 

“I mean, I couldn’t go anyway if I was dead, but now I have to be alive anyway and I can’t go to my dream school and I hate this, I hate this,” he starts to cry, and Len sits awkwardly and watches, the edict of “no physical contact in the hospital” sitting heavy in his brain. He just wants to give his newfound friend a hug - how is “no contact” good for healing?

 

* * *

 

Not all visits go as badly.

 

“Ok, so, if we’d been friends this whole time, what sort of things would we talk about?” Barry and Len are standing on opposite sides of a giant wall hanging that you can color in, each boy coloring in separate sections.

 

Len shrugs, and selects a red crayon. “Life, and other stuff.”

 

Barry laughs. “Real specific.”

 

“I don’t know, Mick and I mostly just talk about whatever,” Len shrugs. “Trees, a lot.”

 

“Trees,” Barry says flatly.

 

“Hey, I’ll dazzle you with my amazing forest expertise!” Len responds, and they could be just two boys hanging out,  _ choosing _ to color instead of being forced to by hospital staff.

* * *

 

 

Sometimes Mick comes to visit too, stubbornly insisting that any friend of Len’s is a friend of his. “It’s a rule.”

 

“I don’t remember this being a rule.”

 

“I don’t remember you having any friends besides me and we’re still in this hospital visitng one anyway,” Mick responds, and Barry laughs.

 

“Strangely, I don’t remember him being my friend, either, and yet.”

 

“You know, maybe we’re just friends on another earth that you guys don’t know about,” Len bats back.

 

“Oh yeah? Well - “

 

The conversation devolves from there. For the life of him, Len can’t think of them actually having said much of anything, but they certainly laughed a lot while they did so.  

 

* * *

 

  
  


They still hang out after Barry’s out, too, and their first stop is an old diner that Len swears by. “The Motorcar? What are they going to serve us, car parts?”

 

“I swear it’s good,” Len says, and then rethinks that. “Ok, I swear it  _ tastes _ good, it’s probably horrible for you.”

 

“Well,  _ I _ swear I miss vegetables and food that tastes good, so I want like. A sundae with a side of broccoli or something,” Barry says as they walk in the door, and Len laughs.

 

“We can buy sundaes, but I don’t know where you can get fast food broccoli.”

 

“Guess I’ll have to wait for mom to forgive me enough to serve it, then,” Barry says.

 

“She still not talking to you?”

 

Barry bites his lip and shakes his head. “Nope,” he overenunciates the ‘p’, “she’s not. Except to tell me that she ‘gave me the world’ and I tried to ‘throw it away’.”

 

“Well, if it helps,” Len says, “my mom’s not talking to me either.” It’s common knowledge around school that his mom had fled his dad’s abuse in middle school, ground in to the point that no one remembers who they heard it from or how they know. 

 

Barry sputters a laugh, and Len grins.

 

* * *

 

 

Len and Barry go out to eat ice cream together at the Motorcar, to celebrate the last night before Len leaves for college (Barry’s school starts later). The conversation’s been unusually stilted all night when Barry clears his throat, and, hesitatingly, says, “I know I said friend, not boyfriends. But. Would you like to be?” 

 

It takes Len a second to parse what Barry’s saying. “Yes, I - yes,” he says, and he can hear Mick snickering in the background even though Mick’s not even _ there.  _ “Yes, I’d like to, go out sometime? If you want?”

 

And they do, and it’s - it’s great, for both of them. Neither of them are exactly mentally healthy, or in really good places, but they play off each other in a good way rather than a bad one. Len thinks that, in a really roundabout way, his therapist did end up making him a good suggestion, after all.

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t go perfectly after that, but it goes. Barry stops trying to kill himself and stars self harming instead. Len’s control issues stemming from his dad’s abuse turn into eating issues that border on an eating disorder. 

 

Neither of them is really “ok.” But they’re getting there. Slowly, but they’re getting there.

 

He’s hanging out with Barry and Mick in a park while Lisa plays nearby, and he opens his laptop to start deleting files. When he gets to his old therapy homework, the letter he’d written that had started all of this, he opens the doc, deletes it all, and starts again.

 

_ Dear Leonard Snart, _

_ Today is going to be a good day, _ he writes, looking at his best friend, his boyfriend, and his baby sister.  _ And maybe tomorrow will be, too. Sooner or later, there’ll be more good days. _ He looks past them, up at the trees, and beyond.

 

And all he sees is blue sky, for forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings for: eating disorder, self harm, and food mentions.
> 
>  
> 
> This is a disaster and I'm sorry but! I didn't think this was even going to have an ending and here is a complete ending for your viewing pleasure.

**Author's Note:**

> This is literally just a bunch of drabbles stuck together, I'm sorry.


End file.
